Manuél Camargo

Manuel Camargo, Marlon Dumas, Oscar Gonzalez-Rojas

A generative model is a statistical model that is able to generate new data instances from previously observed ones. In the context of business processes, a generative model creates new execution traces from a set of historical traces, also known as an event log. Two families of generative process simulation models have been developed in previous work: data-driven simulation models and deep learning models. Until now, these two approaches have evolved independently and their relative performance has not been studied. This paper fills this gap by empirically comparing a data-driven simulation technique with multiple deep learning techniques, which construct models are capable of generating execution traces with timestamped events. The study sheds light into the relative strengths of both approaches and raises the prospect of developing hybrid approaches that combine these strengths.

Bedilia Estrada-Torres, Manuel Camargo, Marlon Dumas et al.

Business process simulation is a versatile technique for analyzing business processes from a quantitative perspective. A well-known limitation of process simulation is that the accuracy of the simulation results is limited by the faithfulness of the process model and simulation parameters given as input to the simulator. To tackle this limitation, several authors have proposed to discover simulation models from process execution logs so that the resulting simulation models more closely match reality. Existing techniques in this field assume that each resource in the process performs one task at a time. In reality, however, resources may engage in multitasking behavior. Traditional simulation approaches do not handle multitasking. Instead, they rely on a resource allocation approach wherein a task instance is only assigned to a resource when the resource is free. This inability to handle multitasking leads to an overestimation of execution times. This paper proposes an approach to discover multitasking in business process execution logs and to generate a simulation model that takes into account the discovered multitasking behavior. The key idea is to adjust the processing times of tasks in such a way that executing the multitasked tasks sequentially with the adjusted times is equivalent to executing them concurrently with the original processing times. The proposed approach is evaluated using a real-life dataset and synthetic datasets with different levels of multitasking. The results show that, in the presence of multitasking, the approach improves the accuracy of simulation models discovered from execution logs.